


Of Magdala

by amoama



Category: Christian Bible, Jesus Christ Superstar - All Media Types
Genre: Domestic Violence, F/M, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 04:16:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1496293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amoama/pseuds/amoama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’m sitting here, in the garden where he betrayed you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Magdala

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).



I’m sitting here, in the garden where he betrayed you. It’s been two days and I’ve spent them wandering between here and that other garden, the one where they’ve buried you. I watched them seal you into the rock and I’m alone now. Yesterday I tried to walk to the potter’s field where they told me they found Judas’s body but it didn't feel right, leaving the city, leaving you, so I turned back at the last mile. I don’t want to believe that you’ve both left me. There was never anyone else for me, not really. Judas never believed that, but you did. 

Now that you’re gone my mind goes back to those other times in my life when I was alone. You were the beginning of my life in so many ways, but there was a life before you too and for a while Judas was my only consolation. He was my one link to a different world.

There was a lot of time I spent, back before the beginning, thinking I was a fool for not choosing Judas when I had the chance. We grew up together. Did he tell you that? Did I? I don’t remember, but it always felt that you must know, like you knew everything else about me, things I’ve never told anyone. You’re gone: and so I feel like telling you now. 

I was not the only one _of Magdala_ in your company. I was just the one for whom the name fit. It was clear even when we were children that Judas was meant for more than our squalid little town. He saw through the people there too easily, spoke up too often to expose their petty ambitions and jealousies. Not many people noticed that he just as often turned his ire on himself. Most of the people we grew up with hated him. I hated him too sometimes. When he mocked me for using my looks to my advantage while haggling in the market or when he told me off for being ashamed of my mother whose brain was a little unsettled most of the time. Did you know that too, I wonder? 

Judas was uncompromising and that made for a tempestuous friendship. Other times, though, I marvelled at him. I saw what he saw, understood people as he understood them, but I had nothing else to use, so I used that knowledge to get food for me and my mother and to get by in all sorts of ways. Judas refused to do that. He refused to be a part of Magdala. His father was not from there; he was Simon Iscariot, from Kerioth in Judah. Judas always had that with him – his sense of separation. But I don't remember a time before he was with us in Magdala or before I wished I could afford to be brave like him. 

He grew up angry and alone; I grew up cynical and numb to shame. Magdala, as you saw, was a thriving fishing town, with its tower erected at the north gate to boast its wealth and success. For a long time they made Judas man the tower because nobody wanted his scathing observations all day in the boats. They made him a watchman for the town, so by default they gave him permission to scrutinize them, and sometimes, on rest days, they listened to him, despite themselves, anxious to hear his praise or censure of their neighbours' behaviour. 

He asked me to marry him three times the year I turned 15 but already it was too late. I had been ashamed to tell him, but I had already engaged myself to Samuel who worked for a boat builder. Samuel had promised to marry me after he sold his first boat and had agreed to look after my mother despite my lack of dowry. I had given myself to Samuel on the night of our engagement to assure him of my commitment. So I looked Judas in the eye and told him no. For a long time I had wondered if he would ask me, because he had this way of looking at me, a passionate kind of scrutiny, that used to make me blush. Simon Iscariot would never have allowed his son to marry an urchin like me. Judas was asking me to run away with him, to live with no clear income or future, in impoverished freedom. He didn't know there was no freedom in that for me, not with the responsibilities I had. 

If things had been different, perhaps, I would have said yes. I was young and we had been friends forever and I didn't want to be left behind. Of course, I wanted to say yes, but I could see already that of all the things Judas understood, he didn't understand me. When he begged me, that last time, he thought he would be saving me from Samuel, from a life selling myself to gain protection for me and my mother, from the gossips of the town – all the tawdry, sinful, pettiness of Magdala that he despised. 

Before he was the watchman, we used to come to the tower and play sometimes. Always, in his game, he carried me down the stairs and out of the tower. He would set me down on my feet and we would dance together, holding hands and running fast in circles till we fell over laughing. I loved those games, I loved to let him carry me, I loved the head rush as we spun together. 

I remembered the softness of his Judean hand in mine when I submitted to Samuel's callused grip as we consummated our wedding vows, but I was comforted by this new texture, real and work-hardened. It offered me something I could believe in. 

I said no to Judas three times and I left him alone in his tower of dreams, where he scorned the world below, because I believed it was better to live in the real world than die a dreamer. 

He left suddenly, after that, and I remembered him fondly for a long time, hearing his voice in my head sometimes, pointing out the hypocrisies in my life, to stop myself from going mad. 

Samuel loved me with the honest brutality of grab and grunt. He was sober and straightforward and silent and I appreciate it more now than I did back then. He worked himself to exhaustion and came home to eat and fuck and sleep. I kept to his timetable so he would have nothing to complain about and was left to myself for the rest of the time. I looked after mother, chased her around the neighbourhood, chatted to her about all the oddities that absorbed her mind: strange, flickering conversations that amused and frustrated me in equal measure. For a while we were almost respectable, Samuel's wife, Mary; his poor mother-in-law, Sarah. I withdrew into myself, talked only to ghosts: friends who were long gone from Magdala. I held Sam's strong hand and my mother's weak one, on Sabbath days walking through the town, and it was easy, in a way, to let myself be obliterated. 

Samuel was a kind husband, if not a considerate one. I barely remember what his face looked like, because I don't believe we ever really looked one another in the eye. We were bodies that shared the same place at night. He treated my body well, as he would treat any body, not because mine was important to him. I opened myself up to him, to be his, because that was the deal I had made for myself. 

Sometimes, as we joined, I thought about how I had looked Judas in the eye and told him no, each of those three times. It had been a strange feeling of command to be able to say it, to watch disbelief and heartbreak shatter his face. I had walked away from that ruthless sort of happiness he was offering and knew it was for the best. I spread my legs for my husband and dreamed about Judas’s eyes and there was a grim thrill in that too. 

Samuel died in August, two years into our marriage. The beam that crushed him was due to the poor conditions in which he worked, that’s what his friends told me when they came, crying and blaming their boss. They looked to me for comfort and I gave them tea and then they looked at me with pity. My mother was too incapacitated by then to comprehend how our circumstances had changed. The house was ours but little else. I sold most of our furniture and we lived on Samuel's small savings for a while. I knew full well my choices as a young widow with no sons, because back then I lived in the real world. 

For a while, Sam's friend Bechor came to the house every few weeks bringing food and some commissions for sewing and mending. When he brought wine too I knew what he was after and I let him take me from behind in the small living room, after my mother had gone to bed. Bechor acted as though it was a great love affair, conducted behind the backs of the town, and his wife, but it was a transaction and I made sure to keep myself in control, to be certain how much of myself I was putting into it and what I would be left with at the end. 

By the time I saw Judas again, rabble-rousing in the town centre, I was a different woman. I had married again, more than once, different kinds of men, different kinds of needs. 

My mother had died quietly one morning, waiting for the pot to boil. There had been steaming water all over the kitchen floor. I had stood there, letting my feet scald as I wept, thinking of the rest of my life without her gentle smile and the hard kisses she used to press to my cheek when I put her to bed. 

My feet burnt so that I still hate to wear sandals and mostly go around bare-footed now – as I was when you met me. I collected ointments to rub over the blisters and angry red scars. 

There was a while back then that I didn't know what I was living for. I woke up one morning next to a corrupt tax official who hadn't minded marrying a woman with dead eyes. He was an outsider from another town who didn't know until it was too late he was marrying the whore of Magdala. It was only after he found out that he started in with the beatings. I fought him back, blow for blow and left his house. I returned to Samuel's dwelling and took on another girl in the same situation as me, Dynah, who made me feel less alone. She and I embraced my reputation: a visit to Magdala was not complete without a tour of the port, the tower, and me, the Magdalene. That was how I kept my control. 

That was how you found me, full of the defiance of a wretched survivor. Judas brought you to me after I heard you speak. Even before you knew me you seemed to speak directly into my heart. Judas looked at me with horror, clearly comparing the Mary he had left behind in Magdala to the one he returned to find. I could see that he believed I had made a mistake in rejecting him and that he thought me completely lost. I smiled at him then, the same smile I had saved for him when he had pretended to fight his way up the watchtower to rescue me. The smile was always for make-believe and so I had never lost it. I don't think he had understood that until then. 

You came up behind him and smiled too, but just with your eyes. You spoke quietly, looking at me so directly that I felt scared and on edge. I watched you put your hand on Judas's shoulder with such tender familiarity that it left me aching. It seemed to ease him instantly. You made him relax in a way no one else had ever been able to do. I saw later how you took his energy, his wild passion, as a gift, showed him how to direct his fears and frustrations. It was a job I had shied, from but you took all his focus and intensity and soothed him with that one touch. At least, for a while. 

I wondered, even in that first moment, who could do the same for you? Oh how I wanted it to be me. 

You asked me, then and there, to come with you, and I did. I'd barely left Magdala at all before then. I took Dynah too and we left our lives to follow you. 

Slowly I walk back to your tomb and sit beside it. I can’t seem to think of anything else to do. After everything that has happened I wonder what was it you offered that made me go with you so easily? I had refused Judas all those years before in order to stay and care for my mother and embrace the reality of the world. Was it just experience that had changed me? Knowing so much more of life and men and sorrow it felt like much less to risk, much more to gain. That was how you made me feel: hopeful, in a way I could never have believed from Judas, angry and alone as he was, cynical as I was. 

We looked at you the same way back then, Judas and I. Without knowing it, we had both been waiting for you. Judas, for a face for his cause: a leader who saw the world as he did. Me, for a reason to start living again. 

You opened up my life for me, gave me a purpose beyond anything I could have dreamed of for myself. It was a privilege to follow you, even to this end. I should have known that what we had would have a cost. 

Here I am, outside your tomb, alone in this garden, with you dead behind this rock. If I had enough strength I'd push it aside to get to you. I watched you pay the price for our dream, a payment more cruel, more violent than I would ever have believed if I hadn't been there to witness it. I held your mother as if she were my own and we cried together in the hope that our tears would blur reality and make what was happening in front of our eyes less true. Did I really once prefer reality over dreams?

I don't blame Judas, my boy from Magdala, from home. I understand his fear, the terror he felt that led him to try and put a stop to this. I think about how he used to carry me down from the tower and about how he looked at you, sometimes, in that same way. I saw how much he loved you, how fearful he was of how far you would go for your cause. We wanted you to live, he and I, and though I don't know how he could have betrayed you, I know above all things: he was crying when he kissed you. 

If I hadn't loved him first, in my youth, would I have been able to love you later, in my experience? My two dreamers. 

I am waiting here, outside this sealed tomb, and I don't know how to move on. What is there that can come after this without you two? Your mother comes, and Dynah, and some of the other women. They bring food and we break bread on the ground in front of your grave and think of your words: to do this in remembrance of you. As if we could ever forget. The wine is bitter and hard to swallow. 

The other women leave at nightfall but I stay and lean against the stone. I rest my head near where I hope your body lies. All I have wanted is to give you comfort and to love you. So desperately I have wanted to be with you, and so I am here. A body lying next to a body, separated by mere stone, waiting together. As the night wears on and I am wrapped up in unearthly moonlight, it's suddenly so easy to imagine the wall between us dissolving. I picture your face drawing close to mine, eyes smiling like that first day, telling me that we can begin again, and I know, I have become a dreamer too.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Riverlight for the beta! 
> 
> SegaBarrett I hope you like it! Thanks for the request I had fun writing it. :D


End file.
